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A book composed of exchanges between a Nobel Prize winning author and an accomplished practitioner of psychoanalysis is bound to have appeal. Yet I found myself puzzled on my first reading. The writers seemed more engaged with their own thought processes than with each other's. Both expound lucidly on their areas of expertise, yet consensus is rare. The result struck me as less of a dialogue than a polite set of disagreements.
The fault may lie in my own expectations. I had hoped for an exploration of the areas of resonance between the practices of literature and psychoanalysis. Instead, I was more aware of the authors' differences in their assumptions, uses of language, and guiding principles.
The Good Story extends a conversation prompted by an email request from Arabella Kurtz to J.M. Coetzee in 2008 for a long-distance interview. Their correspondence resulted at that time in an essay titled “Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazovs,” published in the journal Salmagundi (2010). The Good Story amplifies on this conversation, treating such questions as “true” vs. fictional self-narratives, justice in the form of the “return of the repressed” in fiction and in life, the uses and abuses of confession, and group dynamics, especially in regard to the ways that nations cope with their traumatic histories. Given such a tall order, it is hardly a surprise that many issues are left hanging.
As I mulled over this surprisingly complicated book, I indulged in a fantasy. I imagined, briefly, that the entire text, presented in the form of dialogue, was actually the product of a single mind. If I think about Coetzee's practice of memoir writing in Boyhood and Youth, where he writes about himself in the third person, and the autobiographical pieces collected in Summertime, where he presents aspects of his adult life through the eyes of fictionalized others, my fantasy may not seem so strange. Although I set this fantasy aside, I observed that each chapter of The Good Stor